No, you’re not dreaming. The day has finally arrived – Moon Knight has landed, with the first episode streaming now on Disney+!
The latest chapter in Phase Four of the MCU – and its first new character to be introduced via a TV series – Moon Knight is the story of Steven Grant (Oscar Isaac), a museum gift shop worker suffering from blackouts and a sleeping disorder, who starts hearing disturbing voices in his head (most notably the Egyptian moon god Khonshu, totally normal) and seeing different versions of himself in the mirror. As his many identities become clearer, he’s confronted by creepy cult leader Arthur Harrow (Ethan Hawke), and must piece together his relationship with the mysterious Layla (May Calamawy).
To celebrate the debut of Marvel’s darkest hero yet, we invited Isaac, Hawke and Calamawy along for a special Empire Podcast chat about the show, as well as director Mohamed Diab. You can listen to that in full here, and read the highlights below.
And if that’s still not enough Khon-tent (does that work? We’re going with it) for you, make sure tosubscribe to our Spoiler Specials podcast, where we’ll be sharing weekly deep dives into each episode of Moon Knight, with Episode One dropping tomorrow. Embrace the chaos!
How're you guys doing? Last night was your big gala launch event, which was weirdly timed to coincide with the full moon?
Oscar Isaac: That was amazing.
Ethan Hawke: A full moon in front of the National Museum. We started howling. It got strange fast.
The show is bonkers in the best possible way. When you had your first conversations about it, how much were you told?
Isaac: I was given the first episode and the fifth episode. And those are the ones that have kind of gotten the most... I guess they're the ones Kevin [Feige] felt the most confident about. He thought by showing me those, that I wouldn't run away. And you know, what Jeremy Slater and the writers did, they cracked the structure of the story. Because Moon Knight goes back to 1975, I believe, and he's changed so much. He's probably the most mutable character out of all of them in the MCU really, because it all depends on what the writer is interested in. They come in and focus on that, and his powers would change, his backstory would change, his look would change quite drastically as the years went on, so I think that gave us a lot of freedom. It was about finding the structure of it, starting with Steven Grant, and making him this guy that works at a museum that doesn't know who he is. He's not like the Playboy millionaire, kind of Bruce Wayne clone that he has been in a lot of the comics. That was a great starting point.
But then it was about – okay, well, what are the themes of this thing? If it's about this guy having Dissociative Identity Disorder, how can we orient the whole thing so that it's an external expression of an internal struggle, and make it very 'point of view'? And those are the things that got me excited. And then also just getting a hint on who Steven Grant is. Because it wasn't written that way. It was kind of randomly set in the UK, and I asked, "Why is it set in London?" And they're like, well, we've got too many heroes in New York. So he's an expat in London, whatever, we'll make it work. And ironically, I think originally they were going to shoot here, but then they realised how much cheaper it is to shoot in Budapest. So then it made even less sense. But there was an opportunity to create this kind of indelible, interesting character there.
"Oscar really pushed the show to take mental illness seriously and to take his character’s situation seriously, and that gave the show a point of view." – Ethan Hawke
Ethan – at what point did you know about the bonkersness of the show? What episodes did Kevin, or Jeremy, show you when you first came on board?
Hawke: Well, the bonkersness of it, which is a fantastic word, developed and got more interesting. Oscar really pushed the show to take mental illness seriously and to take his character’s situation seriously, and that gave the show a point of view. Because if you have an unreliable narrator – a guy who's having major time lapses, he's having blackouts, he's not sure who he is, he's not sure of his reality – the next step is, well, what if the whole show went in that direction? If we see the show and experience it through his point of view, it gives us a lot of playfulness. And that playfulness is just something that turned us all on, and we just rode it and rode it and rode it. So as the show developed, it got more bonkers. To put it simply.
Was the opening scene always in place? Because it features your character, Arthur Harrow, in a very interesting situation.
Hawke: Well, I grew up reading comic books. And when I would flip them open, I was like, what did they decide to do a full page drawing of? I was asking the writers and directors and everybody – so if this is actually a comic book and it was a full page drawing of my character, because often they would do that with the villain, and give him a full-page introductory mysterious drawing, it was like, what would it be? I want to know what the drawing of my character would be. And I started just having this vision of him. A lot of spiritual people are secretly self-loathing, you know, like Saint Francis with his hair shirts, and I started imagining that this guy walked around with glass in his shoes all the time. And they liked that, and we ran with it.
I love the fact you can hear the glass every time you walk.
Isaac: It's like spurs.
Hawke: Somebody self-cutting every step.
May, did you have a bit more freedom with the character of Layla?
**Calamawy:**So when I first found out about this, I just got a description that was like, 'Egyptian woman'. And I was like, "Yeah, I'll do it!" [laughs] Something from Marvel with Oscar Isaac and Ethan Hawke – I was like, "Fine, sure." I didn't know anything. A month later, they were like, so this is who you are. And I was like, "oh", and it just got cooler and weirder. And then once we started working on it, we'd have these rehearsals, and I'd be like, "Wait, what?" Because I feel like you guys [Oscar and Ethan] had seen the scripts sooner than I did, right? So I was just kind of like an audience member, and I was really excited to be part of it. And Layla is...I really discovered her as we went along. The first couple of episodes, I still don't know who she is. I don't want to give any spoilers away, but given the circumstances of her life – I don't know anyone to model that from, who's Egyptian, who has experienced what she's experienced.
"It's a huge sense of pride for me just to play an Egyptian woman. I didn't have this growing up." – May Calamawy
She's a woman who can't go back to where she's from, who's like a street fighter in a way, and a wife to someone who's going through a lot. It was really important for me to think about what that was like through the lens of an Arab woman and not just think about it as someone from the West, because it's really different. The conditioning we've had growing up creates a different chemistry, and it meant a lot to me to bring that to Layla. I had so much freedom with it and I'm lucky that they were always like, open to hearing my take on it; no one was really imposing anything. So thanks, guys.
Isaac: You're welcome.
The show draws a lot from Egyptian culture, and representation in this was important, I sense, to Marvel. What sort of conversations did you and the team have about that?
Calamawy: It's a huge sense of pride for me just to play an Egyptian woman. And I hope that people see it. Number one, just being a woman on a Marvel project is really empowering. And then being an Arab – I want it to be more that she's Arab, not just Egyptian, and to represent people from the Middle East is huge. I didn't have this growing up, and to think that I can be, and we can be, part of a project that's really expansive for people from there means a lot. I felt a sense of pride. I didn't really go into mythology, like Egyptian mythology, before this. And so I was like, damn, Egypt's really cool. And I hope that people from the Middle East kind of remember that as well, and around the world. Mohamed was really specific about being authentic. And it was really great to be part of that, because you don't see that often, and I don't blame anyone, but you do need an Arab if you want something truly authentic. So yeah, happy Mohamed was part of it.
Oscar and Ethan, did you guys also immerse yourselves in Egyptian culture and mythology?
Hawke: Well, I would love to do more of it. We had a leader in Mohamed, to kind of be our guide through it and to teach us, and his Egyptian films, for people that don't know them, are just incredible. The guy's really, really gifted. And so he came at this not as a, you know, 'Marvel director', but he came at it as a filmmaker. He and Oscar got along like a house on fire, and had an idea about – wouldn't it be amazing if we put a character study in the middle of a Marvel movie? And also we had a lot of Egyptian actors. He knows a lot of wonderful people and could bring them in to help fill out the world for us.
"I just thought it'd be really funny to be like, “If Peter Sellers was asked to be in a Marvel movie, what would he do? And then how do you subvert it?"" – Oscar Isaac
Isaac: And to create Cairo on a backlog in Budapest.
Hawke: Which is not easy to do!
Isaac: No, and to make it feel incredibly authentic, and stay away from the more stereotypical elements, and really dive into the things that make it feel lived in and feel real. And also the process of exploring these characters, you know, particularly Layla's character, because she was so different in the original incarnation. I mean, she felt a lot more like a Western character. It was Mohamed and his wife Sarah, who's his writing partner and creative partner as well, who said let's deepen the connection. What if they were married? How complicated is that? And by doing that, there is, without being overt, there's these subtle political implications. I mean, I am a Jewish character, you know, he's a Jew from Chicago, Mark Spector – and Steven Grant, a lot of the voice and all that was modelled off of that kind of North East London where a lot of the Jewish population is, and so that that was a really important thing. It was about playing with these really complicated ideas, and to Kevin Feige's credit, like, allowing us to push those boundaries, and get into some complicated stuff.
Hawke: And Mohamed is so sensitive. He did it with grace and intelligence and wit and love. And so it felt dangerous and safe at the same time.
Steven’s accent choice is really unexpected. It would have been so easy to do a cookie-cutter, cut-glass British accent, and you don't. You went for something very, very specific.
Isaac: Yeah, well he wasn't written as English, you know, he was written as an expat. And I kind of thought, “Alright, if I'm going to do this, what kind of character what I want to see in the Avengers?" And I just thought it'd be really funny to be like, “If Peter Sellers was asked to be in a Marvel movie, what would he do? And then how do you subvert it?" Right? Because I have like a natural subversive kind of energy with some of this stuff. So it's like, how can you put it on its head? And that's where a lot of the humour comes from, because he does exactly the opposite of what a normal Marvel hero would do. So it was about finding that, and then making him feel like he believes he has a very specific life in a very specific place. The fact that they decided to set it in London, I was like, well, we should make one of the characters super English. I listened to a lot of different people. I thought of Karl Pilkington. Just his vibe, you know? An Idiot Abroad and this idea of Steven as a bit of an idiot abroad. And then also the comic Russell Kane is another guy who, his biography actually matches in some ways quite a bit.
Was he also possessed by the Egyptian moon god Khonshu?
Isaac: Yes he was actually yeah, yeah. As it turns out. It's kind of amazing but yes. [laughs]
Hawke: He was a consultant.
Isaac: But yeah, I just found those things that just made it really fun to want to live inside this guy.
Were you aware that people might scrutinise the accent?
Isaac: Yeah of course. Especially in a trailer where you just have one line, so you can kind of isolate it and be like, that sucks, that's good, that's not, you know? That's just the nature of the world.
Hawke: I think it was surprising to people, when you see the poster and see you [Oscar] on it, you think you're going to do this whole tough guy thing, and you come on doing something so surprising.
Isaac: Yeah, with this very timid kind of voice. So yeah, that's just the nature of it. I was kind of taking the piss not only out of myself, but out of everyone freaking out about how bad it is, you know.
"It's one thing to play two different characters as an actor, but he often had to do it in the same costume. So it all became a real challenge, how to do that internally. It was beautiful to watch." – Ethan Hawke
It's such a big swing. As actors, what's the biggest swing you've ever taken? And did it pay off?
Isaac: Without a doubt, this is the biggest swing, I think, for sure. To like, do a Marvel show and be the lead character in it.
Hawke: To be the two lead characters.
Isaac: Yeah, and I had to take a massive swing with the characterisation. And yeah, it's really putting yourself out there, you know, it's a big target. And so for me, this has definitely been the biggest.
Hawke: I think we all love to watch somebody take a dare. I loved coming to set to watch you take a swing like that. He was working on both of the voices in the hair and makeup trailer every morning, trying to make it specific, trying to figure out how this one stands, how this one stands, because it's one thing to play two different characters as an actor, but he often had to do it in the same costume. Normally, you can change your costume at least. So it all became a real challenge, how to do that internally. It was beautiful to watch. And it is a huge swing. I love whenever somebody takes a dare. One of the things I often complain about in contemporary movies is that everybody's trying so hard to sell something or make sure it's going to this contingent of people, and we gotta have as many likes as possible on our thing, you know, and it makes everybody kind of make just a really simple hamburger or hotdog. It's just a little boring, and I love to watch somebody take it there. And I think we respond – even if it doesn't work, it's still the more interesting route to go.
And May, what's the biggest swing you've taken as an actor?
Calamawy: The other show I'm on, Rami – Rami's often like, "can you tone it down a bit May?" And I feel like I brought that into here, and everyone was like, "It looks like you're doing nothing." I realised that the stakes are just much higher. I had to really adjust to that and commit, and I had the best scene partners to learn from. I actually would watch Oscar and be like, "Oh, okay, that's how you do this." From both these guys, I think what I really learned was like...I came into it really intimidated. And it's weird. It wasn't imposter syndrome, I was just like, "Am I ready? Like, I don't know." But they really empowered me along the way and taught me – this sounds really cheesy, but I’m gonna say it – freedom, and letting go, because they really let go. And that's really a gift for me, especially in how I was raised, to experience that, and now I'm just excited to work more and to be able to take that into it, thanks to these guys.
Hawke: When I think back on it now, that dare question, I think back on when Richard Linklater first asked me to make a movie for 12 years [Boyhood]. He's like, "I want to make a movie over the next 12 years". Like, okay. That was a big swing, you know? Yeah. But May, you were so wonderful. And also, the Marvel Universe is one that has been oriented and sold to young men. You know, that's where it's been. And so it's very hard, as a woman, to come into that universe and try to carve out space for yourself, and try to carve out space for your character, and you did it with your passion and enthusiasm and your openness and intelligence.
Moon Knight is now streaming on Disney+, and our Moon Knight Spoiler Special podcasts drop every Thursday.